Teaching with Course Management Systems

At each of the last three institutions where I have worked, we have had access to some form of course management system for on-line teaching and improved instructor-student and student-student communication. I must say, I have become a huge fan. I strongly encourage all of my teaching colleagues who haven't yet explored it to check it out!

Here's some of what I love the best:
1) Having an electronic submission option for student work, be that work submitted as a .doc file or just filling in a text box. The CMS time-stamps the submission so there is no disagreement on when it came in. No more "I slipped it under your door!" The best CMS applications allow me to view the submission, make comments, and select a grade, all at the same time. These grades are then available to the students immediately.

2) Open forums where students can post questions about course material to one another and have discussions. Some students have even used this as a way to form on-line study groups. I've used the forums to encourage studying by asking students to post review questions (multiple choice) that they have written, which may then appear on a test or quiz. This also helps me gauge their understanding of course material in yet another way.

3) Scanning work for originality and completion. One CMS I've used had the ability to compare student work submissions to other sources available on-line and not only told me how much of hte paper came from other sources, but highlighted it. You can use this as a teaching tool to help students become stronger and more ethical writers. Down with plagiarism!

4) Ability to organize and post assignments and resources for students. The best CMS applications allow you to organize these easily by date, and then provide buttons you can click to see just one category of posting.

5) Activity logs. It's a little 1984, maybe, but I like being able to see which students have checked upcoming assignments and when they last logged in. I can use this tool as an intervention to pinpoint students who aren't logging in, or, in some cases, to watch for obsessive use and then give the appropriate nudge to stop playing and start working or vice versa.

6) Email and news/announcement capabilities. It's nice to let all the students know of a new change I've made, or address a common question at once. One class I have meets once a week, so half-way through our meeting cycle I can drop a reminding hello. Some of the CMS also will keep and gather responses onto that website in case I feel my inbox is getting too jammed. In a high school CMS, email addresses were never displayed, and complete records of all emails sent or received were maintained by the system. The intention was to create a safe environment for student social networking.

7) Ability to personalize the CMS. Posting pictures and letting students submit files and links increases student ownership of the learning experience.

8) Group management with special pages for clubs or groups. The best of these allow members to sign themselves up, or allow for a leader to immediately subscribe members in a secure fashion.

9) Automatic enrollment and dropping. When linked to your school's admissions & records systems, many CMS have the ability to update your enrollment for you. No having to add students to the course or drop them. In a high school setting, this allowed for easy transfer of scores when students moved from one section of a class to another due to some administrative request. Other CMS allow the students to enroll with a simple code that you give to them so that the task of controlling enrollment is out of your hands.

10) Access to online resources from the publisher. I've mostly used this as a way to point out study aids to students, but my boyfriend uses a CMS that allows him to quickly create a set of online quizzes or activities in which the variables change for each student. Work is time-stamped, students have multiple chances to submit attempts, and scores are calculated (with a penalty for multiple attempts).

CMS systems I have used: MoodleRooms, MyCollege, Blackboard, Schoolloop, MyBiology (online resources only), Turnitin

Readers, I'd love to hear what you think. If you've used a CMS for an online or hybrid course as an instructor or student, what have you enjoyed about it? If you have used other on-line tools to ease workload, what has been helpful or what do you like?

Essential Questions for Biology

Always up to improving my curriculum, this semester I will be continuing my work to apply aspects of the Understanding by Design (UbD) curriculum model to my courses. This model, developed by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe based on their work at the college level, and published by ASCD in 2005 ("http://www.shop.ascd.org/productdisplay.cfm?productid=103055"), involves two main elements: 1) focusing learning around essential questions and 2) designing assessments to evaluate student understanding of these questions before designing individual lessons of instruction.

Today I would like to share the 10 essential questions I plan to use this semester in my Non-Majors Biology course. Yes, these questions may seem very deep. Essential questions are intended to be something which requires the student to reach into their ability to apply, analyze or evaluate information or situations. The questions are to be the sort of stuff that you could make a life of answering, spiraling back on them again and again as you grow in your understanding of a particular content. Ideally, assessments would let students demonstrate their understanding of these questions, perhaps through essay form, but more ideally by taking the information they have learned reaching for these questions to create something.

1. How do scientists investigate a problem and report their results?
2. What should every person know about biology?
3. What is life? Why are there ambiguities about what “life” is? What factors might you examine to classify life into groups?
4. How will a basic knowledge of chemistry help you understand and explain biological processes?
5. How do processes that happen at a cellular level influence the structure, functions and behaviors at level of tissues, organs, organ systems or entire organisms?
6. How do DNA and RNA control the structure and function of cells and of entire organisms?
7. How are cell division and reproduction related? Why is there sexual reproduction?
8. How do we know if an ecosystem is “stable” or “healthy”?
9. How, and why, do different structures found in very different organisms (such as plant vs. animals) perform similar functions? What types of evolutionary adaptations, found in different divisions of life, have increased efficiency and survival or organisms?
10. Why did Theodosius Dobzhansky say that “Nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of evolution”?


I am curious for your input, readers. What questions do you think are essential, either in biology, or in your own discipline

Creating Community for Community College Instructors, Part II

At both community colleges at which I teach, today and tomorrow are Flex Days. A Flex Day is designed for a mixture of meetings and professional development. Between College of Marin and Skyline, it is a mix of convocations, department meetings, curriculum meetings and new staff orientations. Skyline is also opening a new Science, Math and Technology wing this semester, so there was unpacking of boxes, distribution of keys and trying not to get too lost in the hallways.

In the process of my meetings today, I was introduced to a fellow instructor who teaches evening classes. His comments confirmed my earlier thoughts: Teaching evening classes can be especially isolating for instructors, as the chance to meet up with peers is very limited. Like myself, he is eager to improve his teaching, and notes that it is very difficult to do a straight lecture class such as Anatomy, in the evenings. He has been looking for ways to improve his teaching, but with few colleagues to interact or share with, it makes the teaching rather lonely.

Luckily, he and I may be able to meet up once a week, as my lab ends about an hour before he is scheduled to teach. My hope is that he and I could meet up periodically for an evening meal and talk about how to make lectures more engaging. Perhaps we'll also have the chance to observe each other teaching, and collect data about our practice and our students. I have a similar project going with three other colleagues called a Teaching Square, which I will discuss in an upcoming post, and while I don't see it appropriate for him to join us now, the intention is that our Teaching Square program will be expanded in the future.

Another benefit I am seeing from working at community college, which I have sorely missed at the K-12 level, is the chance to talk to my colleagues about research. Since community college instructors in science typically have a Master's or Doctorate, I have peers who have done scientific research, and I can draw from their research experience to further inform my teaching. I am very excited about that.

Creating Community for Community College Instructors, Part 1

Community college teaching, I am discovering, can in some ways be more isolating and lonelier than K-12 teaching. In K-12 practice, you are on campus daily with the same group of adults, even though you may not interact with them on a daily basis. You may also be meeting with your peers on a regular basis; at my former high school I met with some subset of my peers formally once a week.

In community college, you are lucky if there is a departmental meeting each semester. You may know few of your colleagues, even in your own department, especially if you are teaching part-time or in the evenings. This makes it difficult to feel a sense of community, or to exchange ideas about how to better reach students by improving instruction.

To combat some of my isolation, I am considering a variety of professional societies focused on science education, reflecting my own focus on Biology. Societies are listed in descending relevance:
National Science Teachers' Association
Society for College Science Teachers
National Science Education Leadership Association
Association for Science Teacher Education
National Association of Biology Teachers

I will likely elect for membership in the first three, as well as Sigma Xi or possibly AAAS.